On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, S. Mike Dierken wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dan Brickley" <danbri@w3.org>
>
> >
> > My interest is in cataloguing these services, regardless of the mechanics
> > of interaction with them. I suspect that doing so will help make the case
> > for careful use of HTTP GET. Once it is easier to find such services (or
> > 'web sites', as we used to call them) it'll be easier to mechanically
> > generate links into them, which in turn might encourage deployment of
> > GETable interfaces.
>
> What would happen if the HTML <FORM> was annotated with type information?
>
> For example, weather.com could indicate the acceptable values for input
> fields. Crawl the web and find all GET based forms that accept zip codes.
> You could annotate the FORM with the semantic meaning of the result as well
> (the specific media format would be indicated in a live response - but maybe
> you might list the potential content-type responses supported) to build up
> better service descriptions.
>
> --- http://www.weather.com ---
> <FORM ACTION="/search/search" METHOD="get">
> <INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="where" value='98034'
> valuetype='namespace-of-zipcode-data-type'>
> </FORM>
This would be rather nice. Hopefully XForms has something in this
direction...
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/
Looking at their requirements,
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-forms-req#datatypes
[[
3.1 Data Types
XForms will provide a set of common data types, and may facilitate the
construction of custom data types.
3.2 Data Type Identifiers
XForms should include the means to provide globally unique identifiers for
types which can be used to establish that a given type is the same as used
in other forms.
3.3 Input Validations
XForms should be able to express restrictions on user-entered data, with
enough sophistication to handle common cases, like "telephone number".
XForms should define how the user agent should behave when the
user-entered data conflicts with the restrictions defined by a data type.
]]
...this is promising. So taking a look at the spec...
XForms is now in Candidate Recommendation:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/CR-xforms-20021112/
[[
This Candidate Recommendation provides an opportunity for these changes to
be reflected in implementations, and for the XForms Working Group to
collect test cases and information about implementations. We expect that
sufficient feedback to determine its future will have been received by 05
March 2003.
]]
There's a section on datatypes; both 'xml schema' datatypes and 'xforms
datatypes': http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/CR-xforms-20021112/slice5.html
From a quick visit to the spec I can't see how implementable your scenario
would be, though things seem to be moving in the right direction...
Dan
--
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